Chapter 5 - Earthly Delights

As Margery had told Bianca, that night in the suite at The Plaza Grand Mohandas had experienced things that he hadn't read about in the Kama Sutra. This wasn't surprising as he's never read it. He'd never been with an older woman. Yet Kat, as Margery had called herself, had been amazingly sexually aggressive, taking the lead. He was used to twenty-something women who, in his culture, were or pretended to be shy - mildly flirtatious at best.

Between bouts of athletic sex, followed by both falling back to recover, he'd claimed to be the best developer and code-smith on the team. When she doubted him he said he could prove it. Then she said she an idea that would test his skills. And he said: "just show it to me, I'll do it now."

"OK I'll show you. But it might take you hours, or days, even if you're as good as you claim," she said. "You'd have to take time off, what about a sickie tomorrow?"

That was when he agreed to call in sick and spend the day proving how good he was at writing code.

After that they went at it again and he sort of forgot about it. Kat was quite different to the only other girl that he had been intimate with. This was a real woman. He found that he particularly liked her luxuriant pubic bush, which seemed so mature.

"There's nothing as unnatural as a hairless pussy," she told him smiling. "That's why I don't shave. It's unnatural. I'm a hairy Kat, as nature made me."

"It's lovely," he'd said, running his fingers through the silky forest in wonder, 'hirsute' he remembered the word. He'd never experienced a real woman like this so intimately. "Her suit - suits her," he thought to himself, smiling.

"Would you like to play with Kat's pussy again tonight?" she asked flirtatiously; seeing his smile.

She was suggesting that she would be happy to see him again after work. He felt a thrill run through his body. He'd feared that this had been a one-night stand.

"Yes of course," he said, not believing his luck. He was already thinking about sending flowers to her at work. He gave her his home address.

But after she'd showered and was getting dressed she seemed hesitant; concerned.

"I don't want you to risk your job over staying home sick to write code for me."

He'd completely forgotten his challenge and having agreed to take the day off to prove himself.

"So I'll only come if I can visit your apartment completely unseen, perhaps using the rear entrance tonight?" Kat said as she let him zip up her black party dress, pleased at his fumbles.

He was yet to shower and was still naked. His growing excitement at the prospect was all too evident. Her now tightly encased bottom caressed his erection, underlining the double entendre.

"So that will be your first test. I need you to use your vaunted uber-skills to make some sort of 'widget' that will let me come and then leave undetected," she said flirtatiously, turning and kissing him.

"If you can finish my widget before I leave work today I'll visit you at home tonight. Now I have to go home and change for work. Perhaps I'll see you later?" With that she opened the door and disappeared.

It was still early. He had an idea for a perfect widget. He had a quick shower; made some initial design notes; placed some orders; got dressed; went down and checked out; then dropped in on an antique store on his way home.

***

When Margery got back late from her enjoyable lunch with Bianca there in her in-tray was a small parcel marked to the attention of Kat. The mail robot had long ago been instructed that 'Kat' was Margery's pet name for friends and family and to direct anything labelled 'Kat', particularly flowers or chocolates, to her.

Mohandas was proving to be well chosen in many ways. She had to give that much credit to Bianca. The parcel contained a gold ladies' powder compact with a fold up mirror. A loose piece of paper inside, over the powder puff, said: ‘Press Here - when the mirror glows green - it's safe to enter’. She had her VPA, Circe, confirm this to be sure. Her reading can be a little unreliable at times.

***

That evening she tried hernew widget out and it was brilliant. It unlocked the fire doors and his back door was unlocked too. As she entered she whispered her concern about possible cameras out there. But he laughed proudly and assured her that her widget had all that in hand. The cameras and body heat sensors; as well as the ultrasonic and microwave motion detectors had all been disabled.

She was dressed for the occasion. She shed her jacket revealing her thin silk light peach coloured blouse over her otherwise bare breasts. Unlike her party dress last night, her charcoal silk skirt was full and she did a little spin so that it flew up Marylyn style so that he caught a glimpse of suspenders. Then she stopped and smiled coquettishly as it wrapped itself around her.

"Now let me have a look at you," she said, undoing Mohandas' shirt buttons and pulling the cream fabric free of his pants to reveal his fit brown torso beneath. Then she stepped back exclaimed: "Oh yes, I wasn't imagining it! Very nice! And thank you so much for my widget. You are as smart as you claimed!"

She embraced him and her by now redolent perfume enveloped him. Despite his early morning shower he'd been smelling her on his hands and arms all day. She felt his excitement growing and gave his bulging trousers a nice rub. He was an easy one. Margery knew he would be entirely Kat's to do with as she liked before her alter-ego had finished with him.

Margery was impressed by his apartment and a wave of jealousy swept over her. Here was old money. The apartment occupied a full floor of a multistorey block and had balconies on three sides overlooking the surrounding parkland. It was sumptuously decorated in the style of a maharajah's palace, with bronze statues of multi-armed gods and goddesses in niches. The floors were polished hardwood partly covered with hand-woven rugs and the furnishings were low settees and some very large cushions.

There was a separate scented air zoned Multidimensional video viewing room with 3D screens on all four walls and full surround audio to recreate any virtual environment. Wearing a haptic body stocking she saw that it had wonderful potential for reliving some of her more erotic recordings from Kat's past conquests. She imagined leaving Mohandas tied-up in his bedroom while she came in here and enjoyed herself. And tonight she would have some new recordings to add to her collection.

The kitchen was also large and well equipped but it was obvious that most of his meals came pre-cooked delivered into the servery by drone. There were several toilets but only two bathrooms, one opening off his bedroom and one off the large guest bedroom that seemed to be seldom used, perhaps by visiting relatives? One of the biggest rooms in this vast apartment was his dedicated workroom where the air was filtered. There were several large screens above a long bench on one wall and opposite there was another bench with various incomprehensible pieces of equipment, several housed in their own cabinets. This must be where he'd designed and assembled her widget.

Mohandas was very proud of this room and went on about its technical features enthusiastically. The only part of this she understood was how he could scoot around the room on his old fashioned work chair over the glistening hardwood floor. And that was only because he gave her a demonstration.

***

He'd saved his greatest pride to last. It's his private art gallery at the heart of the apartment, a central space behind the lift-well with no natural lighting. He opened the wide doors at one end to reveal a long room with a thick dark red carpet beautifully papered in subtly striped red silk a shade lighter. The entire ceiling glowed with a soft sunrise light, casting no shadows, yet could be raised to a pure white light centred on a particular painting simply by walking in front of it. Rather incongruously in an Indian themed apartment, it was hung with European oil paintings. The largest of these, with all three panels it's big, over two metres high and nearly four metres wide, was on the far wall: Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Margery gasped. She was like a sailor unexpectedly confronted with a blow-up of a habitual illicit pin-up. As a teenager she would unfold her ancient paper print of The Garden of Earthly Delights and view it as the sailor might, under the covers. Now here was the actual work. Naked Marilyn Munroe writ large. When she went up close it was evidently genuine, down to the texture of the finest brush strokes. But surely it should be in the Prado in Madrid?

Her love for The Garden of Earthly Delights is visceral. There's a delicious progress from left to right. The thought of Kat taking someone on the journey, from one panel to the next, is enough to make her swoon. She imagines leading an innocent out of the idyllic, left Garden; to large central, worldly panel, and the fun of introducing them to each of its erotic debaucheries in turn. Even now, if she's alone and craves arousal, she brings the central panel up on her screen; zooming in on the debauched characters in turn; imagining how her Kat would toy with each of them. Having, in her imagination, degraded her victims and, like their God, tempted them and led them to sin sufficiently to justify their destruction, Kat casts them into to the satanic dark right-hand panel of weird punishments, biological experiments and fires falling from the sky; a broken clock symbolising eternity.

Margery looked away, lest the excitement of being so close to her familiar hunting ground 'in the flesh' overwhelmed her.

There were dozens of other apparently genuine paintings to look at, by Klimt and Munch and Balthus and Courbet and Renoir and Matisse and Monet and Manet and Picasso even Rembrandt and Van Gogh. Each too seemed to be the originals.

Her jealousy mounted. This was totally unfair. All these famous paintings. Mohandas must be a billionaire.

Mohandas laughed at her amazement. He found this level of technical naivety odd for someone like her in the industry. Obviously the all necessary data was in the Public Domain and readily available in The Cloud. He explained that they're all reproductions. They look so real because their surface and any underlying image is identical to the originals. They have been digitised in 3D from hundreds of images, scanned by archivists using high definition cameras moving side to and top to bottom. Why taking more than one image was important Margery had no idea, don't you just hold up your hand-held in the gallery? Then he'd somehow created them in ancient oil paint or something, from the data, using one of his 3D printing thingies. Some technical gobbledygook about extruding multiple threads of different oil colours. But she understood that he'd created their frames too, using a different 3D thingy of which he seemed to have a number.

Apparently he'd also made the Indian miniatures elsewhere in the apartment.

"I don't care if they are the original or not," he told her, "I have them because I like them, not for their resale value. And I like a lot of the classics."

Margery decided that he was like an audiophile Kat had once played with. He'd dwelt on 'the classics' too. Margery was still enjoying the fruits of his estate. Among his vulnerabilities was that he delighted in the exact reproduction of his favourite music, even more than the music itself. He wanted to be able to close his eyes and actually be in the concert hall. Kat had suggested that with virtual reality he could be transported there. It was in this virtual world that Kat had been able to progressively introduce him to the perverse central panel, exposing his vulnerabilities and previously unrealised desires in the process. The recordings she'd made when Kat had led him to the virtual world of Ken Russell's The Music Lovers were among the most exciting and perverse in her collection. Like Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky in Russell's film, he'd eventually ended his own life in confusion and in despair. After fully exploring the depths of his depravity Kat had eventually tired of the game and cast him into the inevitable final degradation: the metaphorical right-hand panel.

***

Margery had been lost during all Mohandas' technical talk but felt better that it was evident that his pictures, although physically identical to the originals, were not very valuable.

"That's odd isn't it?" she told him, as Kat caressed his torso. "It's like all those exact replicas of Michelangelo's David. But only the original in Venice is worth much more than the marble and the cost of carving it." Kat's fingernails were sensuously carving his chest as she spoke. Then Kat pushed his shirt off his shoulders and it lay, spread out, fleshy, like a cast off skin, on the red carpet. Now he was her David in cream cotton pants.

After a few subtle questions Margery learnt that he'd been given this apartment by his parents who'd gone to take up royal responsibilities in what had once been the country of India. His workroom was in what had once been his mother's private sitting room. And no, he was the younger son and wasn't enormously wealthy. To make ends meet and to make his changes he'd sold off most of his mother's original artworks, which had once hung in this art gallery. That was when he'd perfected his art copying techniques. Even the Indian bronzes of Ganesh, Parvati, Shiva, Lakshmi, Durga, Kali and so on, were now reproductions of his mother's originals, somehow scanned and then made from real bronze in a great big green boxy thingy with a window, that he proudly took her to see in his services area.

All the credit he'd got from the art sales, and almost everything he earned now, went to buying more equipment for his hobbies: like building the electronics for his flying robots and writing their software. Again Margery was annoyed. It didn't seem appropriate that a code writer, thirteen years her junior, should live comfortably in such a palace, invisibly consuming past family assets, when her apartment was much more spartan and down-market.

Margery determined that Kat should set that right.

***

Mohandas' art collection was an ideal place to begin this subjugation. So Kat insisted on viewing each piece around the room; all the while clinging to his bare, quite muscular she was pleased to note, arm.

Like her past lover's selection in music, Mohandas' art collection revealed at least one of his weaknesses. It was a collection that the notorious twentieth century playboy, Hugh Heffner, might have chosen. Somewhere in this apartment she would find a silk dressing gown and maybe even a tobacco pipe. There may even be a collection of ancient 'Bunny of the Month' centrefolds stored in memory in his viewing room or on his bedroom screen. She hoped so.

Among the exact reproductions in Mohandas' gallery was Jean-Honoré Fragonard's famous painting of young man fallen before a young woman. He's gazing up her billowing skirt as she comes towards him on a swing, with her white, stocking clad legs in disarray, her most private parts open to his gaze. Its full title is The Happy Accidents of the Swing. The plural suggests the repetition at each forward swing.

"Why do you have this one?" Kat asked. "Are you a voyeur? Does looking up a woman's skirts turn you on? That's a bit off isn't it?"

Mohandas didn't know what to say. The way she'd said "a bit off" made him feel perverse, dirty. Of course he had imagined himself as the fellow in the painting. Yet he's never been fixated or voyeuristic like his friend Raj, who describes himself as a 'pants man'. Raj likes summer in the gardens when young girls rest, legs apart, on the lawns or hitch up their skirts to sun their legs. The map of his lunchtime walks with Raj is more Miro than Mondrian, as they wander in circles around a lawn for Raj to get a better view; or make a sudden bee-line towards a distantly glimpsed opportunity, all the while chatting away earnestly about economics as if disinterested.

Once, when stood-up by Raj for lunch, Mohandas had gone to the Gardens alone. There he discovered Raj helping a colleague out of a tree that he'd somehow persuaded her to climb. Mohandas had guessed at an office dalliance. Her loose skirt over his head as she descended into his arms was Raj's idea of getting a room.

To hide his present embarrassment Mohandas quickly began explaining that the painting had political overtones. The man pushing the swing had once been a bishop but Fragonard had had to change him to a servant. But Kat was so dismissive of this as a reason to have and 'up-skirt painting' that he quickly moved her on to the next painting.

Now like someone in the twentieth century proudly showing off his new slide projector to the neighbours, he'd accidently left a pornographic slide among the holiday snaps. The next one was Rembrandt's portrait of his mistress Hendrickje Stoffels: Hendrickje Bathing in a River.

"Oh yes," Kat exclaimed, delighting in this apparent confirmation of her accusation. "That's more like it isn't it? Look into the shadow below her bundled skirt and the way it's held in front of her legs and there's an even more intimate view reflected in the stream. But alas for deviants like you, her most interesting reflection is below the bottom of the frame. You are a real pervert aren't you? You're more turned on by these up-the-skirt suggestions than by all your nudes with their cunts fully on display aren't you?"

She was being deliberately crude, bumping her hip against him and holding his arm firmly with both hands against her breast as she used that crude word; playing with his mind. 'Pervert' and 'deviant' were obviously not intended to be insults but badges of honour.

Now they were both smiling at the Fragonard. But now he had accepted the proposition it was time to have him join the club.

"Are you a compulsive voyeur? I bet you're one of those deviants who choose to sit downstairs in a two level carriage on the platform side, gazing up in delight as women board the train. Should I check for equipment under the seat when I use your bathroom? Have you got a camera in a shoe too? You're one of those perverts who secretly spy on women's toilets and dressing rooms aren't you?" she asked, enjoying his rapidly disappearing smile.

He was totally outraged. He shook himself free and stared at her, angry and wounded. How could anyone suggest such a thing?

"I'm just playing with you," Kat told him, smiling. "I find your up-skirt pictures very arousing too. I really do," she added unhelpfully, turning in front of him and taking him in her arms.

Her greater height allowing her to hold him as mother might hold a distressed child. He was still injured and struggled but she held him until he felt better and was becoming aroused yet again. She felt and smelt so sexy. Then, looking around ostentatiously, Kat gave him another playful pat or two with her metaphorical paw, claws out just a little:

"I love this blood red room, in the centre of your apartment like this, it's very Freudian. It's your mother's womb isn't it? So it must be confusing for you to come in here to enjoy your erotic paintings. I mean on a subconscious level. Can you get off in here? Or are you blocked by oedipal confusion?"

He was appalled, things were going from bad to worse. What sort of person did she think he was? He'd never tried to 'get off' in here. These pictures aren't pornographic. They're great art.

From her observer's perspective Margery was enjoying this cat and mouse game. Mohandas was a lovely little brown mouse for her Kat's delight.

***

The last blow had hit home. Mohandas realised that she was right about the room, it is alarmingly Freudian. This had been his mother's gallery. So maybe his desire to replace her art with his art is subconscious - evidence of a latent Oedipus complex. Perhaps his wish to deny his pictures' erotic content is Freudian. He decided that he needed to change the colour scheme, at the very least, but he would never accept that his beloved art collection is pornographic or edit that.

He was finding the whole gallery experience very disturbing yet at the same time, arousing. Mohandas had always dreamed of sharing his art collection with a responsive woman. She seemed to be very aroused. He'd been able to feel her firm breast and occasionally her hard nipple against his bare arm through the thin silk of her blouse, as she held him to her while flirtatiously going from painting to painting, particularly pausing and admiring the nudes. Yet by comparing them, in the most lascivious and intimately physical terms, to herself and to women in general, she had repeatedly pointed to a pornographic intent. Each time she drew attention to a 'nice cunt' or 'to a fuckable body' it felt like a blow to his artistic sensibilities and so to a central pillar of his existence, upon which he'd invested thousands of hours of work and a great part of his very being. She had steadfastly refused to treat his paintings with the respect that great art is due. Instead, their alleged pornographic sexuality was apparently what she'd liked about them. And she was clearly aroused. He desperately wanted to deny that they were pornographic while at the same time growing more and more excited that her alleged motivation for liking them was pornographic. He was beginning to deliberately draw her attention to paintings that might arouse her more.

And so he led her to his Balthus.

Mohandas' Balthus reproduction depicts a nude pubescent girl with a cat. The naked girl is uncomfortably posed over a chair with her arm stretched up towards the cat; lying on its side; eyes almost closed; on a high table behind.

Original in the National Gallery of Victoria - Melbourne Australia

The effect on her was extraordinary. Kat seemed to be transfixed and she actually began to purr, apparently mimicking the cat. After her initial contemplation she moved behind Mohandas and pressed herself to his back as her arms embraced his chest, rocking him back and forth, rubbing herself on him erotically. Then he felt her hot breath as she began to nibble his ear. He progressively became firmly erect. Her hand had descended and unzipped his pants; freeing his member and taking him in hand.

"Oh yes, this one makes you very hard! I knew you were deviant but this one is definitely excites you most. You're a latent paedophile!"

He was so distracted by her sudden blatant sexuality, anticipating taking her here and now, that he was slow to insist that his excitement had nothing to do with the painting. Yet before he could mumble an explanation her sharp fingernails dug into his member 'til he cried out in pain. And her voice became accusatory:

"Don't you try to deny it! Look at the cat, even it knows that you are looking lustfully at that girl."

Now Kat's voice was purring in his ear telling him to look at her more closely and indeed with her libidinous commentary the girl did seem increasingly sexy. But then Kat began to detail his alleged but non-existent desires for younger and younger children in horrifyingly explicit terms. As she spoke he could feel her beginning to tremble with excitement.

Initially he was repulsed by her vile scenarios but as her evident excitement mounted her words seemed increasingly seductive and he began to be aroused with her, becoming hard in her hand again. Then she suggested what he might do with 'this' and went just too far.

No! This could not happen! He shook himself free; took the painting down; and faced it to the wall. He couldn't look at it anymore. It was the cat's evil awareness, pretending aloofness but looking out into his now troubled soul. Both Kats had ruined the painting for him.

"Oh don't do that," Kat cried: "She's so beautiful! If you don't want her, can I have her?"

In his confusion and anger he picked the frame up and handed it to her like a petulant little boy.

***

When Margery had seen the Balthus she was reminded of her of herself at that age. Her mother is in the background gazing out of a window, waiting for Uncle Ron to arrive. What a rush of mixed emotions she'd experienced! After her initial shock she decided to have Kat make Mohandas give her the painting on the spot. Soon it would be easy for Kat to make him do anything. So this would be an early overture.

After whispering admiringly that she could see what he, the pervert, liked about this one, the girl was still a child, Kat asked him if a deviant, like he, frequently lusted after children perhaps he hung around school yards? She whispered some scenarios. Kat was just starting to have fun, suggesting things that he might do with a little girl or even a little boy, based on Margery's actual experiences that age, when Mohandas broke free angrily, declaring that he was not a paedophile and took the painting down, facing it to the wall. She was slightly disappointed at how quickly it had worked. She'd hoped that Kat's exquisite delight in his growing discomfort would last longer. She was barely trembling and hardly into recalling a typical session with Uncle Ron. But it had been stimulating. She would revisit this with Mohandas once she had no other use for him.

At less than a metre wide the Balthus will be easy to wrap and carry away tonight on her hover-bike.

Her favourite, The Garden of Earthly Delights, is far too big to carry now. Kat will make him give her that too, after she's organised a courier to take it away, along with the Fragonard and maybe some others. Mohandas will soon be Kat's, to do with as she wants.

The Fragonard and Rembrandt have confirmed her plan for the first stage in his training and very soon Kat will be taking Mohandas further into the central panel of her garden of earthly delights.

Kat excused herself to visit his toilet. She would need to remove her knickers once again.

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Travel

Denmark

In the seventies I spent some time travelling around Denmark visiting geographically diverse relatives but in a couple of days there was no time to repeat that, so this was to be a quick trip to two places that I remembered as standing out in 1970's: Copenhagen and Roskilde.

An increasing number of Danes are my progressively distant cousins by virtue of my great aunt marrying a Dane, thus contributing my mother's grandparent's DNA to the extended family in Denmark. As a result, these Danes are my children's cousins too.

Denmark is a relatively small but wealthy country in which people share a common language and thus similar values, like an enthusiasm for subsidising wind power and shunning nuclear energy, except as an import from Germany, Sweden and France.

They also like all things cultural and historical and to judge by the museums and cultural activities many take pride in the Danish Vikings who were amongst those who contributed to my aforementioned DNA, way back. My Danish great uncle liked to listen to Geordies on the buses in Newcastle speaking Tyneside, as he discovered many words in common with Danish thanks to those Danes who had settled in the Tyne valley.

Nevertheless, compared to Australia or the US or even many other European countries, Denmark is remarkably monocultural. A social scientist I listened to last year made the point that the sense of community, that a single language and culture confers, creates a sense of extended family. This allows the Scandinavian countries to maintain very generous social welfare, supported by some of the highest tax rates in the world, yet to be sufficiently productive and hence consumptive per capita, to maintain among the highest material standards of living in the world.

Fiction, Recollections & News

﻿A Digger’s Tale

- Introduction

The accompanying story is ‘warts and all’. It is the actual memoirs (hand written and transcribed here; but with my headings added) of Corporal Ross Smith, a young Australian man, 18 years of age, from humble circumstances [read more...] who was drawn by World events into the Second World War. He tells it as he saw it. The action takes place near Rabaul in New Britain.

Opinions and Philosophy

The Origin of Life - according to God

Back in April 2013 I had another visit from our neighbourhood Jehovah's Witnesses, a pretty young woman and her husband, recently married. Like Daniel (mentioned elsewhere on this website) before them, they had brought copies of The Watchtower and Awake; which I agreed to read if they were prepared to read my paper: The Prospect of Eternal Life.

I keep a couple of copies of The Prospect of Eternal Lifefor just such occasions and have also given a copy to the local Anglican minister and to various other active proselytisers in the area; with similar conditions. Of course I know it will not change their position but I do like to have the debate and amazingly so do they; it beats the usual reception they get; and they get some practice in trying to convert un-believers.